It’s a glorious spring day on the edge of the Norfolk Broads and a rumpled, booming-voiced, snaggle-toothed fortysomething in a purple jacket and bright floral shirt – like a nicer, upper-class, English Sir Les Patterson – is trying to tell me how he made his unlikely and soon-to-be-vast fortune.

Unfortunately it’s quite impossible, surrounded as he is by excited eight- and nine-year-olds begging for his autograph and dying to tell him that his woodland theme park is the most brilliant they’ve ever visited. “Do you really think so? That’s nice,” he says, still mildly surprised by his own success.

The man’s name is Tom Blofeld – as in nephew of cricket commentator Henry “Blowers” Blofeld, as in the family that supplied the moniker for James Bond’s cat-stroking nemesis – and the park the children are making all the fuss about is called Bewilderwood.

It was born of a mixture of desperation and frustration: desperation to make 750 acres of unprofitable inherited land somehow pay its way; frustration because Blofeld would have much preferred doing something creative rather than running a boring old estate. But against the odds – visitor attractions, like restaurants, often fold within two years – Bewilderwood (or BeWILDerwood as it’s written on its website) has become one of East Anglia’s most popular tourist draws, bringing in 150,000 punters a year.

“It’s an absolutely first-class development,” says Peter Williamson, chairman of the Norfolk Tourist Attractions Association and owner of the Merrivale Model Village in nearby Great Yarmouth. “A lot of park owners have looked at it and thought, ‘That is such a clever idea.’ It’s somewhere everyone in the family can play together happily.”

Blofeld now plans to build two similar attractions, in London and the Midlands. “There are so many potential sites, especially on aristocratic estates that have plenty of disused woodland originally created for shooting. All you need is road access.” If these pay off, he’ll soon be living off the interest.

“In the first week of opening last year, I had to go on the radio asking people to stay away because there were so many coming we just couldn’t cope,” says Blofeld. “But the greatest accolade for me was when the chief designer for Center Parcs Europe came up to me and said, ‘I love this park. How do you do it?’”

How indeed? We’re used to seeing TV documentaries about distressed aristocrats on agreeable, crumbling estates they can’t possibly afford to maintain, so it comes as rather a shock to find the cliché overturned.

Tom Blofeld is a charismatic, affable chap but he’s no MBA high-flier (his “totally useless” 2:2 degree in art, European thought and literature and philosophy is from Cambridge, but from the former polytechnic not the university) and his only previous business experience was selling fireplaces.

As for Bewilderwood itself, though it’s impossible not to be charmed by it, you could still quite easily come away wondering what the fuss is about. The boat ride through the bogs at the beginning is sweet, especially when Mildred the crocodile snorts water at you. The wobbly bridges, zip wires, steep slides and maze are entertaining too but within the hour you’ve done them all and they’re certainly not going to give you the adrenaline rush you’d get at, say, Alton Towers.

My seven-year-old daughter loved the whole thing to bits but I did feel some of the rides were – “Not that exciting?” says Blofeld, completing the sentence with unexpected enthusiasm. Er, yes. “But that’s exactly it!” he says. “This is the secret we stumbled upon, which our competitors still find impossible to comprehend.” And with that, he leads me out of Bewilderwood and up to his house to tell me how it all began, where it’s going, and about the baffling yet ingeniously simple secret behind his success.

“I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid being a toff,” says the 43-year-old Blofeld, as we sit on the immaculate lawn of his family seat in Hoveton, near Norwich, gazing over the ha-ha towards the oak-studded parkland where lambs are gambolling in the sun. “It’s a meritocratic, democratic world now. Being an ordinary geezer gets you a lot of opportunities, whereas I’m not sure being a toff doesn’t corner you in some way.”

You might find it hard to feel sorry for him and Blofeld, a tousled, left-leaning Europhile who would rather eat worms than send his son to Eton in his footsteps, would agree. “There’s nothing more sick-making than people with money banging on about how tough they’ve had it,” he says. The fact remains, though, that the very last thing he wanted when he hit middle age was to inherit a 1,500-acre estate, large chunks of which were earning “precisely nought pounds and nought pence per annum”. He would much rather have dropped out and gone to art college, maybe ending up as a children’s author.

Sadly, as the elder son of the senior branch of landed gentry who made their fortunes in the 17th-century cloth trade, Blofeld’s future had been decided since the age of four. That was when his father, Sir John – a distinguished High Court judge – organised the settlement trust that would hand him the estate.

“Father’s prayer was that at college I’d spend three years growing up. A prayer that was never answered,” says Blofeld. “He’s a complicated, very intelligent, sensitive man – more artistic than you’d expect of a High Court judge – with a formidable mind. Am I like him? It’s the same as it is in so many father/son relationships. Not at all and, at the same time, an awful lot.”

After his stint at college, Blofeld talked his way into a position for which he was patently unqualified, curator at the Courtauld Institute of Art. “Getting the job was quite easy. I moved in as an intern, after which it quickly emerged that I was the only person there who could drive a car who also had any kind of practical ability. I insisted on being [given] the grade of curator and, because they needed me, they gave it.”

When the Courtauld became part of the University of London, Blofeld was quickly rumbled. But it was fun while it lasted. “I was once given the job of reframing two Cézannes, two Manets and a Van Gogh. I remember at midnight one night, hallucinating with tiredness because we all worked round the clock, taking out all the rotting iron nails from “A Bar At The Folies-Bergères” and replacing them with conservation grade ones, completely on my own. It was amazing I could be trusted with a thing like that.”

Between his 20s and late-30s, Blofeld’s maverick career included a “futile period as an art dealer”, in which he thinks he may not have sold a single painting, a year’s stint as an artist on Osea Island in Essex when he painted only four pictures, a year in the City, and six or seven months bumming around south-east Asia “doing the usual things”. His one vaguely successful project was establishing Templestone Fireplaces in 1994, the subsequent sale of which, in 2005, financed yet another happy year swanning around doing nothing.

It was then, however, that responsibility struck with a vengeance, when his father handed over the estate, with the expectation that it would be maintained for the next generation, as it had been since the house was built in 1680. “If you’re a High Court judge, you can get round this one by being paid a reasonable salary,” says Blofeld. “But I had no income whatsoever, which is no good on an estate that only just breaks even thanks to property rentals and about 500 acres of farmable land. When you think that its book value is around £10m, that constitutes an appalling return on your money.”

. . .

It was at this point that Blofeld’s adolescent yearnings and current needs rather handily converged. He would open a theme park in the least productive part of the estate – the bogs and woodland of its private section of the Norfolk Broads – and base it around one of those children’s books he’d always wanted to write. In the self-published A Boggle at Bewilderwood, he created two tribes of woodland creatures – the Boggles who live in the bogland and the Twiggles who live in the trees above. These would provide the framework narrative for the park itself.

Next stop was to spend a year with his business partner Simon Egan inspecting the competition in Britain and France. Egan was a friend of a friend whom he met in a pub and who, like Blofeld, was sick of not making quite enough money. “I’m not a finisher, not a details man,” says Blofeld. “He [Egan] is somebody who can say, ‘That’s crap, Tom. This is better.’”

On their travels it became “abundantly clear how shoddy British amusement parks are compared to the ones on the continent. They seemed to be informed by a sense that the British will put up with it, no matter what. But the British won’t any more because they go abroad too much.”

Whatever charges you could lay against Bewilderwood, shoddiness isn’t one of them. The cafés and the souvenir shop are housed in handsome log cabins; the rides, mostly wooden constructions with wood chips at the bottom to break your fall, meld attractively with their pinewood surrounds; the mini Boggle and Twiggle villages you glimpse through the trees are expensively crafted by skilled modelmakers.

Before they could embark on the project, though, they had to get the land surveyed to check whether they would be breaching any environmental regulations. Blofeld’s wife Leslie Felperin, a film critic for Variety, used to tease him when they went to inspect the proposed site by pointing and shouting, “Badger!” Fortunately there were no badger setts, nor were there any great crested newts. With £2.3m borrowed against the value of the farmland, the project could go ahead.

Some things proved less difficult than expected. Health and safety, which ought to have been a nightmare on anything to do with small children and high trees, turned out to be quite manageable. “You just need very rigorous rules and very expensive staff training,” he says. Other things proved harder, like making money out of each visitor. “I can’t remember what the total average spend per head is but it’s much lower than you’d think. Something like £11.20 per head.” Indeed, when you consider that the normal admission price is £10, this is not a lot.

Its popularity, none the less, has exceeded his wildest expectations. The key, he believes, is partly the strength of his fantasy narrative but mainly the delightfully low-tech, old-fashioned quality of its entertainment – which, for all its simplicity, often keeps its young visitors enraptured for four- or five-hour stretches. “Every other amusement park is trying to be bigger, wilder, stronger, cooler. We aren’t like that at all.”

In this, whether by accident or by design, Bewilderwood has attuned itself perfectly with the concerns of the age. It’s wholesome, natural, eco-friendly; it’s about children playing nicely together – as a half-dozen scout packs were on the day I visited – just as they did in the good old days when kids made their own entertainment with ropes and bits of wood. “Kids leave the average amusement park wired and tired and upset because there’s just too much adrenaline. Here, everybody leaves with a smile,” says Blofeld.

Now – if he wants to, which he’s not sure that he does – Blofeld is guaranteed an intact estate to pass on to his young son Rufus. “I’ve mixed feelings about primogeniture”, he says, “but there’s a lot to be said for keeping the estate in one pair of hands. At least then the family has somewhere it can gather. Otherwise, within 100 years there’s just a diaspora.” He also believes he has found the perfect business model for straitened landowners with a similar desire to make their estates work for them.

Perhaps most importantly, he has made his peace with his father, who still lives on the estate and likes nothing better than showing his friends what wonders his errant son has worked. “It’s the big difference between my father’s generation and mine. They had a rock solid mandate to keep the status quo. My generation’s mandate was to become modern. I think my father understands that now. It’s made us closer than we’ve ever been.”

Bewilderwood is open until November 2. Opening times vary, see www.bewilderwood.co.uk

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Low-key attractions: Family fun far from the madding crowds

Bank holidays can be a problem for families who want a day out but are allergic to commerce and crowds. Instead of queuing for hours in tacky theme parks or milling aimlessly in over-crowded shopping centres, here’s a selection of low-key places that won’t (we hope) be full-to-bursting this long weekend, writes Isabel Berwick.

Beckonscot, Beaconsfield
A huge model village stuck in a 1930s timewarp, plus spectacular model railways, a good play area, and plenty of parking. All the profits go to charity. On traditionally wet bank holiday days, there’s a bit of cover by the café (no focaccia, just scones wrapped in clingfilm, and hot chocolate from the machines).
www.beckonscot.com

Centre for Alternative Technology, Machynlleth, Powys
An unpromising name keeps a Welsh gem well-hidden. But there is lots of really cool hands-on stuff for kids at this seven-acre display of all things sustainable and eco, including a ride on a 60m cliff railway powered by water balancing. And a wholefood café, obviously.
www.cat.org.uk

Horniman Museum, south London
A good bet for a rainy day, this museum is free, has a world-class ethnographic collection and lots of natural history exhibits, plus a small aquarium. It’s inside a fantastic park. It gets busy but there’s plenty of space in and out. And, I will say it again, it’s free.
www.horniman.ac.uk

Logan Fishpond, Stranraer
A charming 200-year-old seaside tourist attraction. The pool was cut from the rock by workmen employed by a local laird who wanted to store live sea fish. Visitors can feed the fish (as they have been doing for generations) and now there’s also a touch pool, an aquarium and a gift shop.
www.loganfishpond.co.uk

City farms
Many city farms run special events over this weekend and at this time of year they all offer the simple pleasures of blossom, baby animals and tadpoles. For urban families it means a wholesome afternoon without the bank holiday traffic jam.
Find a local farm atwww.farmgarden.org.uk