TO the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle the other evening, to sweep through the newly widened main gateway (the better to admit coaches carrying visitors from afar),to wonder yet again at the floodlit French magnificence of the building ....and then inside to admire a pair of chocolate gloves.

The occasion was ostensibly a preview of the extraordinary collection of entries for the Jerwood Prize, a national award competition which is open to a different category of artists every year. In 2000, the genre was jewellery. The chocolate gloves, life-size and incredibly life-like, were an entry and the artist responsible, besides contributing a range of chocolate accessories to her centrepiece, also had on show a real-ice bangle which melted gracefully away during the evening.

In fact, although the jewellery - all of it striking, almost none of it conventional and some of it frankly outrageous - is well worth a visit during its weeks at the Bowes as the first stop on a tour of the regions, the main event was the farewell appearance of the long-serving curator of the museum, Mrs Elizabeth Conran.

Warm tributes were paid to her, notably by Lord Eccles, chairman of the independent trust which now runs the museum (see editorial comment on this page ). She is richly deserving of them, having guided the museum through difficult times and fully upheld its fine reputation; it is good to know that she is not leaving the area - although she must surely have been tempted to return to her native Scotland - and is to be on hand as a consultant.

It remains galling that the attractions of this splendid museum, although recognised by the cognescenti as among the top flight in the country, is not better known among the public outside the region.

The aim of Lord Eccles and his fellow trustees, and of course the new man in day-to-day charge, Mr Adrian Jenkins, who arrived this week with the new title of director, is that the museum should be accorded 'national' status. That promotion which would ease the financial strains that have been endemic at the Bowes for most of its 109 years is long overdue.

Meanwhile, I suggest that one way to make the place a household name is to get national TV to take up an idea this newspaper has floated before: the dramatisation of the stranger-than-fiction saga behind this spectacular building - how a bastard son of the Bowes-Lyon dynasty, a wealthy mine-owner barred from inheriting as Lord Strathmore, marries a French actress and how together they plunder post-revolution Paris of its art treasures.

Over to you, Tyne-Tees, if your drama department wants to enhance its network credentials.