The name Larkhall, or Laverock Ha, first appears in journals around 1620. Laverock is the Scots word for skylark, and for centuries visitors assumed the town was named after the bird that sang above its fields. The truth is more prosaic. There is no real evidence of skylarks giving the town its name, and Laverock was almost certainly a surname. The earlier form Laverockhaugh combined that surname with haugh, the Scots word for a boggy or wet area. The town sits on high ground between the River Clyde to the east and the Avon Water to the west, on the edge of the scenic Clyde valley, fourteen miles southeast of Glasgow.

The Morgan Glen viaduct strides 175 feet above the Avon Water, 285 yards long, the tallest viaduct in Scotland. It was built between 1898 and 1904 for the Caledonian Railway by Sir William Arrol & Company, the Glasgow engineers responsible for the Forth Bridge and Tower Bridge in London. When the railway line closed in 1965, the viaduct began its slow decline. It was nearly dismantled in the 1990s before a local heritage group fought to save it. Today it stands closed to the public for safety, but Category B listed, a working-class town's piece of monumental Victorian engineering left rusting at the edge of the woods.

Local legend remembers a woman known only as the Black Lady, said to have been the Indian servant of Captain Henry McNeil Hamilton, the last owner of Broomhill House. According to the story she was brought back from one of his voyages, found Larkhall harder than her old life, and was forbidden to leave the house during the day. When Broomhill fell derelict, men supposedly moved a 500-hundredweight stone lintel down to the Applebank pub on Millheugh Road, only to find it next morning lying across the road. In the 1960s a film crew from the BBC programme Tonight arrived to attempt what would have been the first televised exorcism. According to local accounts, the cameras froze in fine weather, filming was abandoned, and the director died in a car crash on the way to his next location. Folklore or accident, the story has clung to the house ever since.

On 22 December 1999, a gas explosion in the town killed four people. The subsequent legal proceedings against Transco, the gas supplier, became one of the most significant corporate accountability cases in Scottish legal history. In 2003, Scotland's High Court ruled in Transco plc v HM Advocate that it was legally competent to charge a company with culpable homicide — a landmark decision — though the culpable homicide charge itself was ultimately dismissed on technical grounds. Transco instead pleaded guilty to breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act and was fined £15 million, then the largest health and safety fine in UK history. For most of the town the event was simply a wound: a family lost, a neighbourhood scarred three days before Christmas. The case is now studied in Scottish law schools as a watershed for corporate accountability.

Larkhall's sporting story is closely tied to one club. The Larkhall YMCA Harriers were founded in 1930 and remain one of Scotland's longest established running and athletics clubs. Their most celebrated member was David Keir Gracie, born in 1927 and a member of the Harriers from his teens. Gracie represented Team GB in the 400 metres hurdles at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, then in 1953 won the World University Games title in Dortmund and a silver medal in the 4 by 400 metres relay. He died in 2020 at 93, having spent most of his life in the town. Larkhall is also home to Graeme Dott, the 2006 World Snooker Champion, and was once home to Paul McStay, the long-serving Celtic and Scotland midfielder, although McStay's career took him in a direction the town's main football allegiance did not.