Construction began in 1957 in the northwest of South Uist. Locals protested. The Ministry of Defence wanted not just a launch site but a military town and missile-assembly facilities that would have covered much of Uist. The fear was that an influx of English-speaking personnel would destroy what remained of the Gaelic language and Catholic island culture. The author Compton Mackenzie, who lived on the Hebrides, wrote a satirical novel called Rockets Galore! about a missile range on a fictional Hebridean island, which was made into a 1958 Ealing comedy of the same name. The actual resistance also produced a granite statue, Our Lady of the Isles, raised on a hill above the range by Canon John Morrison, nicknamed Father Rocket. The range was built, but smaller than originally planned. The town was never built.

The MGM-5 Corporal was the first nuclear-armed guided missile fielded by the British Army. Range tests ran on South Uist from 1959 to 1963. It was succeeded by the MGM-29 Sergeant, then by the MGM-52 Lance, each generation of tactical nuclear weapon trialled on this strip of machair facing the open Atlantic. Soviet AGI trawlers, fishing boats with antennae bristling above the bridge, regularly intruded into the target area. Radar tracking was conducted from a station on Hirta, the main island of the St Kilda archipelago, fifty miles further out. The range was also used to fire high-altitude research rockets, the Skua and the Petrel, sending science instruments up beyond the atmosphere from sub-Arctic Scotland.

The site is owned by the Ministry of Defence and operated by QinetiQ, the privatised remnant of the old Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, since the early 2000s. It now consists of a deep sea range for complex weapons trials and an inner range for ground-based air defence systems such as the Rapier missile, plus uncrewed aerial vehicles. In 2016, the UK announced £180 million of investment in modernising the facilities. In 2023, Exercise Formidable Shield brought more than 4,000 personnel from 13 nations, 20 ships, 35 aircraft (including Eurofighter Typhoons and F-35 Lightning IIs) and 8 ground units to the range for the biennial NATO ballistic missile defence test. In 2024, the DragonFire directed-energy weapon, a laser, was fired here against aerial targets.

MOD Hebrides occupies hundreds of square kilometres of restricted airspace and sea. The actual built footprint is small, a cluster of tracking radars, telemetry receivers, support buildings, and the dispersed firing positions out on the machair. On most days nothing visible happens. The corncrakes call in the grass, the Atlantic rolls in, and the road past the range is quiet. The community below the statue of Our Lady continues in Gaelic. The range that was meant to destroy that culture has somehow accommodated itself to it, an awkward neighbour that has become, after seventy years, simply part of the landscape.