Before the Lammefjord was drained between 1873 and 1943, Odsherred was nearly an island, joined to the rest of Zealand by a neck of land about two hundred metres wide east of here, where the mill at Dragsmølle stands. That neck was the drag, where crews hauled their boats overland rather than risk the water north of Zealand and then sailed on toward Roskilde. Draugh is first mentioned in 1313 or 1320, Draugsholm in 1336. Dragsholm is simply the holm - the islet - by the drag, and until the reclamation it sat with water on three sides, below the terminal moraine that rises to the north at Vejrhøj.

The oldest Dragsholm was not a castle but a palatium, a bishop's hall, put up by the Bishop of Roskilde around 1215. The dating comes from its windows: three-part Romanesque openings of a type Bishop Peder Sunesen had installed in Roskilde Cathedral's new ambulatory, arranged here in three groups of three along a great hall 22.5 metres long with six metres to the ceiling. On sunny days their outlines still show in the south wall. Around 1490 the place was rebuilt as something far more serious - a closed ring-wall castle with a gun tower at its northeast corner standing twenty-eight metres tall on walls two metres thick, ringed by a double moat. It earned its keep. Besieged from January 1535 during the civil war known as the Count's Feud, shelled by Count Johan of Hoya, Dragsholm was never stormed and was the only castle on Zealand to hold out.

The Reformation of 1536 took Dragsholm from the church, and for the next 128 years it belonged to the crown and served as a prison for noble and clerical prisoners. Cells were fitted inside the great northeast tower, and the Danish accounts are precise about the logic: a prisoner's cell was equipped with a privy and a window or not, depending on his crime, his conduct, and - not least - the seriousness of his insults to the king. The first notable inmate was the man who had owned the place: Joachim Rønnow, the last Catholic bishop of Roskilde, arrested with the rest of Denmark's bishops when Christian III broke the church and spent its property on his war debts. Another was the squire Ejler Brockenhuus, described in the sources as raving mad.

James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, was Mary, Queen of Scots' third husband. After the collapse at Carberry Hill in 1567 he fled north and was picked up off Norway at Karmsundet without papers. In Bergen he ran into Anna Throndsen, whom he had abandoned years before in Scotland; her family was powerful and she sued. Frederik II might have released him, but word came that Scotland wanted him for the murder of Lord Darnley, and he went to Copenhagen and then across the sound to Malmøhus. He was a political asset only while Mary might be restored; once that hope died he was worth nothing, and was moved to Dragsholm - possibly, the Danish account allows, because he had suffered a mental breakdown. He died here on 14 April 1578, held in what the record calls appalling conditions, and was buried in a vault at Fårevejle church. Whether he was truly chained to that pillar for a decade is the castle's story rather than a documented one; the timeline does not quite fit. What is documented is bleak enough: a man kept for eleven years by a king who had no use for him and no reason to let him go.

Swedish troops occupied Dragsholm during the wars against Karl X Gustav, and around the 1660 peace they packed the great tower with powder. The charge took off its top and dropped the whole east face. A survey in 1662 recorded it as "gandske sprunget og nederbrudt" - quite blown up and broken down, nothing left but bare walls and stones. It came back through debt. The king owed the Copenhagen merchant Henrik Müller and paid him in 1664 with a ruin; Müller owed the Hamburg merchant Manuel Teixeira and passed it on; Teixeira sold it in 1694 to Frederik Christian Adeler, who rebuilt it as the white-walled baroque house standing today and marked the finish in 1697 with wall anchors bent into his and his wife's initials. It became a barony in 1784 and was renamed Adelersborg, until a later Adeler - the man behind the draining of the Lammefjord - restored the old name in 1868. The family lost everything in 1932 and it has been a hotel ever since. Guests report three ghosts: a grey lady, a white lady, and the Earl, riding through the courtyard behind a full team.