The Antonine Wall ran from Old Kilpatrick on the west coast of Scotland to Bo'ness on the east, and the eastern terminus was at Carriden in the north-east of the modern town. UNESCO added the wall to the Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site in 2008. A Roman fortlet still stands at Kinneil. Roman artefacts keep emerging from local farmland, including the Bridgeness Slab - a carved stone showing a suovetaurilia (a Roman religious sacrifice of a pig, sheep, and bull) - now in the National Museum of Scotland with a replica unveiled in Kinningars Park in 2012. The Roman fort of Veluniate, somewhere under the grounds of Carriden House, is long since lost; locals say stones from the fort were used to build the mansion.

Bo'ness was a recognised port from the 16th century. Coal sailed from here to supply Edinburgh Castle in 1548, and the harbour grew through the Industrial Revolution into a serious commercial port by the Victorian era. Customs dues moved here from Blackness in 1672. The town made salt, threw pottery (including the iconic black 'wally dugs' that sat in pairs on countless Scottish mantelpieces), and broke up ships - the Forth Ship Breaking Company would drive condemned ocean liners and warships up the beach on a high spring tide, lower the anchors, and dismantle them where they lay. Kinneil Colliery at the western edge of town employed over 1,200 people at its peak and tunnelled under the Forth to merge with the Valleyfield Colliery in Fife. It closed in 1982.

In the grounds of Kinneil House, west of Bo'ness, sits the ruin of a small cottage where James Watt worked on his experimental steam engine. The steam cylinder of a Newcomen engine survives nearby. This is one of those modest Scottish sites where world history was actually changed - Watt's separate-condenser design made steam engines efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution that transformed everything Bo'ness did for the next two centuries. Kinneil House itself, mentioned by Bede as Pennfahel ('Wall's end') in Pictish, sits in a public park incorporating a section of the Roman Antonine Wall. The grounds also host the Bo'ness Hill Climb, a motorsport course that hosted the first ever round of the British Hill Climb Championship in 1932.

Ballantine Castings, founded as the Bo'ness Iron Company in 1856, has made ironwork for British bridges and public buildings for nearly 170 years - the fascia panels of Westminster Bridge, ironwork for the Palace of Westminster roof restoration in 2019, and replacements for the Elizabeth Tower (Big Ben). The company collapsed into administration in 2013 and was revived as Ballantine Castings the following year with government support. The Walker timberyard still cuts wood beside the Forth on the Carriden Industrial Estate. The Museum of Scottish Railways sits at the station of the Bo'ness and Kinneil Railway, the heritage line that resurrected the town's Victorian rail connection. And the children's Fair Festival, with its associated low-power radio station Valley FM that broadcasts only during the festival days, continues a tradition that has outlasted the coal mine, the shipbreakers, and the petrochemical era.