The story starts at the close of the fourteenth century with the Brandsen family, who built the first farm here. Jens Brandsen is the name that survives. In 1404 Ulstrup passed in pledge to Jens Nielsen of Aunsbjerg, of the Løvenbalk family, and two years later part of it came into the hands of Queen Margaret I — the monarch who had bound Denmark, Norway and Sweden into a single union and who spent much of her reign quietly reeling noble land back toward the crown. Ulstrup was a small piece of a very large project. Then the original house simply disappeared from the record, and Ulstrup carried on for most of a century as nothing more than a village on the river.

Christen Skeel, born in 1543, was a privy councillor with the means to consolidate. He acquired Ulstrup in 1579, gathered up farms in and around the village, and had the old house cleared away to make room for a new manor in 1591. That building survives as the low north wing of the courtyard you walk into today. The transformation came from his son. Jørgen Skeel held the office of rigsmarsk — Marshal of the Realm, the kingdom's senior military post — and between 1615 and 1617 he expanded his father's house into a full four-winged Renaissance castle with octagonal towers at the corners. The eastern side was closed by a lower gate wing whose central section carries a small tower topped with a lantern. In 1668 a substantial working farm, the avlsgård, went up alongside it. The west wing came down in 1755.

Skeels, and later Scheels, held Ulstrup until 1809. After that the estate began coming apart in the way most Danish manors did — slowly, then all at once. The nineteenth century brought a different kind of prosperity to the place: the Langå–Viborg railway line opened in 1863 and Ulstrup reappeared on the map as a railway town, a settlement organised around a timetable rather than a manor. By the 1920s the estate itself was dissolved and most of its land sold off in parcels. The castle kept its walls and lost its reason for being. A four-winged Renaissance house without an estate is a very expensive empty box.

From 1951 the remaining grounds housed an amusement park and a zoo. It is easy to be sniffy about this, and worth resisting the urge. The alternative available to most orphaned manor houses in that era was the demolition contractor. Ulstrup spent thirty years earning its keep from day-trippers, and the buildings were still standing at the end of it — which is more than can be said for a great many Danish country houses that kept their dignity and lost their roofs.

The recovery began in 1980. Land that had been sold off was bought back, the buildings were thoroughly restored, and Ulstrup was reestablished as a manor house rather than an attraction. Since 2004 it has been held by Ulstrup Fonden, a foundation whose stated purpose is to preserve the buildings and make the rooms available for artistic and cultural use — concerts, exhibitions, gatherings. The estate now runs to something like 650 hectares, most of it woodland. The setting does a lot of the work: Ulstrup sits directly on the bank of the Gudenå, midway between Langå and Bjerringbro, where the river runs wide and slow through meadow. Jørgen Skeel chose the site for a marshal's seat. Four centuries later it still reads as one.