BeWILDerwood

Andy was due at University of East Anglia, Norwich on Friday to give a seminar and spend the day talking to various people at the Environmental Science Department. Given that Norwich is about 240km north east of Oxford, meant that a day train trip for Andy was not an option, so we decided to make a trip of it and all go together. We broke up the travel there by stopping in Newmarket overnight.

After dropping Andy at the university on Friday morning, the girls and I ventured off to BeWILDerwood based on recommendations from friends. Navigating solo through Norwich in morning peak hour traffic was a little stressful, however after only one wrong turn, we arrived just before 10am.

Located in the Norfolk Broads, BeWILDerwood is a wild and imaginative adventure park with magical treehouses, zip lines, jungle bridges, boat trips, story telling and intriguing characters. Now the characters are those from a series of books written by local author Tom Blofeld. We were completely oblivious of the books and the characters however after spending 4+ hours at the park, we had grasped various aspects of the characters and places. On exiting BeWILDerwood through their gift shop we picked up the 3 book series!

The first book 'A Boggle at BeWILDerwood' is summarised:

Swampy is a young Marsh Boggle, who loves eating Sweetsludge Pie and going boating in the pongy swamps of BeWILDerwood. Boggles in general don't go far from the safety of their quiet reed village and Swampy is not really the bravest of Boggles. So when he does try out a bit of exploring in the Scary Lake he soon finds that it is called scary for a reason. Something huge is lurking in the water, but what is it?






BeWILDerwood was truly a magical place for children. We climbed numerous ladders to enter treehouses, crossed many rope bridges as well as the broken bridge (a suspension bridge), slid down several slippery slopes including all together on a large 3 wide slide! We mastered the tricky tunnels as well as the muddle maze. We spotted the Twiggle and Boggle Villages and played at BeWILDerville. Zipping along the Wobbly Wires (flying fox) was fun too!





Our picnic lunch corresponded with a large rain shower, but safely beneath the Big Hat teepee we didn't notice. After lunch, we joined in with some Twiggle Twirling and met several puppet characters before catching the boat across Scaaary Lake passing Mildred the Crocklebog on our way out. Needless to say, it was a very quite drive back into Norwich to find our hotel with two exhausted girls!