The town is named after the Bannock Burn, a stream running through it before flowing into the River Forth. The probable site of the battle lies between the Pelstream and Bannock burns, on relatively flat ground that gave the Scottish schiltrons — those bristling formations of pikemen that were the deadly answer to medieval cavalry — room to manoeuvre and the English heavy horse little room to charge effectively. Bruce had chosen his ground carefully. He had concealed pits behind the front line to break up a cavalry attack. He had a small but disciplined army, hardened by years of guerrilla warfare in the Highlands and Galloway. Edward II had brought what looked, on paper, like an overwhelming force — but the English army was a coalition of contingents under quarrelsome lords, and it had marched a long way to relieve a single castle. A large monument and visitor centre now stand near the battle site. In earlier generations tourists came to look at the Borestone, a fragment of stone in which Bruce was said to have planted his standard. The dignity of the barony of Bannockburn is currently held by Hope Vere Anderson, a descendant of the Sandilands and Vere families of Lanarkshire who were the original Barons of Bannockburn in the fourteenth century.

More than four centuries later, after the catastrophe of Culloden in 1746, Charles Edward Stuart — Bonnie Prince Charlie — stayed at Bannockburn House. It was here that he met Clementina Walkinshaw, who would become the mother of his only acknowledged child, Charlotte. The Stuarts and Bannockburn made a strange pairing: a defeated Catholic prince taking shelter on ground that his Protestant great-great-grandfather, James VI, had stood on, and where his ancestor James IV had inherited the crown at Sauchieburn just a few miles to the south. Scotland is a small enough country that its historical sites lean on each other in this way. Bannockburn House still stands, a B-listed seventeenth-century mansion, now owned by a community trust and open to visitors.

What Bannockburn used to be famous for, beyond the battle, was tartan. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Wilson family of Bannockburn became Scotland's most prolific tartan weavers, designing and producing the chequered woollen cloth for the British Army's Highland regiments. The Wilsons made the tartans that, in 1822, suddenly became politically essential — King George IV visited Edinburgh that year, with Walter Scott as his master of ceremonies, and insisted that the Highland chiefs attend his banquets in their clan tartans. Many of the chiefs had no idea what their clan tartan looked like, because the modern concept of a clan tartan had only just been invented. They went to the Wilsons in Bannockburn for suitable patterns. The Wilsons supplied them. Many of what are now taken to be ancient ancestral tartans were in fact designed in Bannockburn between 1815 and 1840 to meet a sudden, royal demand. The woollen mills employed seven to eight hundred people around 1880. The last mill closed in 1924.

By the late twentieth century Stirling and Bannockburn had grown into a single contiguous conurbation, and Bannockburn was incorporated into the royal burgh of Stirling. The 2001 census recorded a population of 7,352. The town has a library, local shops, two football clubs (Bannockburn Amateurs, founded 1968, and Milton FC, founded 1972), a rugby club, and a cricket club. Bannockburn Amateurs have won the West of Scotland Amateur Cup five times. Bannockburn Primary School sits in the centre of the community; Bannockburn High School is in nearby Broomridge and has had to be extended in 2007 and 2008 to keep up with new housing schemes. The railway station that operated from 1852 to 1949 is gone; train passengers now go into central Stirling. The town is served by the 38, 51, and C30 bus routes. A new station with park-and-ride was proposed in 2009 and has not yet materialised. Two Church of Scotland parishes, the Catholic Our Lady and St Ninian's, a United Free Church, a Gospel Hall, and a Christadelphian hall (formerly a carpet factory) cover the town's religious needs. The town's most famous Telford-designed circular-arch road bridge over the Bannock Burn is still in service.