Valdemar had just won a civil war. At the Battle of Grathe Heath in 1157 he defeated his rival Sweyn III, and the following year he made good on a debt to God by handing a stretch of western Himmerland to the Cistercian order. The monks who took it were led by Abbot Henrik, refugees from Varnhem Abbey in Sweden after a falling-out with Queen Christina Björnsdotter. They did not stay long enough to define the place; monks from Esrum Abbey on Zealand replaced them, and Esrum is reckoned Vitskøl's mother house. The site sat on an ancient trade route running through north central Jutland, close enough to the Limfjord to trade by water and far enough from anyone to farm in peace. Work on the buildings began in 1158, which makes Vitskøl one of the oldest surviving monastic complexes anywhere in northern Europe.

By 1165 Vitskøl had grown enough to send monks out to found a house of their own, and what followed reads like a slow-motion comedy of soil science. They tried Sabro first. The ground would not farm. They moved to Sminge and found the same problem. They moved into the recently abandoned Veng Abbey, where disputes over land claims forced them out again. They tried the island of Kalvø in Skanderborg Lake, and the poor soil defeated them a fourth time. Only on the fifth attempt, at the site that became Øm Abbey, did the colony finally take root. Øm went on to become one of medieval Denmark's most important monasteries — founded, in the end, by monks who had spent years being politely evicted by dirt.

The plan was cruciform: three aisles, a transept, an apse, and a scale meant to answer the king's wish. The cloister was an extravagance by local standards, with several apses built into it. Masons worked on the choir and transept for well over a century. Then, in 1287, fire tore through the abbey and destroyed much of what they had built. The great church was quietly abandoned as an idea, and a smaller abbey church went up to serve the community that actually existed rather than the one the king had imagined. It did not much dent the abbey's fortunes. With royal protection and gifts from local nobles, Vitskøl became the largest landowner in the district. It owned the island of Livø, held the right to a market at Trend Strand, and cut a canal linking what is now Bjørnsholm Å to Vilsted Sø. The fourteenth century was its high-water mark.

In October 1536 Denmark became officially Lutheran, and Vitskøl passed to the crown. The abbey was allowed to keep operating, but forbidden to accept anyone new — a slow administrative starvation. The last monks walked out in 1563. Ten years later the estate went to Bjørn Andersen, a powerful noble who converted two of the conventual buildings into a residence and renamed the whole thing Bjørnsholm, Bjørn's isle. The abbey church served as the parish church until the early seventeenth century, when the parish decided it was simply too large to keep in repair and moved the services into the west wing instead. The great church was abandoned outright in 1668. After that, local people took it apart for building stone.

The state bought the property back in two parcels, in 1934 and 1942, and the principal residential building took back the name Vitskøl Kloster. The farm is still called Bjørnsholm. The surviving buildings have been restored and now serve conferences and education; the ruins — foundation stones, fragments of the great church — are protected and stabilized. The strangest survival is botanical. When the abbey gardens were abandoned they simply went feral, and when researchers went looking centuries later they found that many of the medicinal plants the monks had cultivated were still growing wild on the grounds. Local organizations have partially restored the herb garden, and it is used for plant research. More than a hundred varieties grow there now, descendants of a pharmacy that nobody tended for four hundred years.