Walk through the dunes to Cherry and Webb beach pretty much any Thursday, Friday or Saturday morning in the summer, and you're liable to find fantastical creatures, jovial elves and towering minarets growing out of the fluffy Buzzards Bay sand. Amidst them, Richard Huggins will be hard at work with a worn trowel in one hand and a plastic straw affixed to a lanyard around his neck.

Early this past Friday, a stylized 18" skull slowly appeared and as the morning drew on, ancient, enormous books bloomed underneath, stacked some two or three feet tall.

"I get asked all the time, 'Where do you get your ideas?' Too much Mad Magazine when I was a kid, I don't know."

All Huggins knows is that when the weather is good, there are few places he would rather be than the beach. The Westport resident has been sculpting sand into whatever his imagination can conjure for nearly 40 years, and at 72 he still gets immense enjoyment out of his near-daily work.

"It's the Zen of the sand," he said of his pastime's appeal. "It's just calming and it's so much fun."

Work it most definitely is.

Huggins usually pulls in to the beach around 7 a.m., takes his gray beach wagon with oversized wheels out of the car, loads it up and starts out on the 200-yard walk to the water (actually, just above the high tide line). The wagon is generally loaded down with everything he needs for the day — large sheets of rigid, thick plastic used for forms, scrapers, brushes and shovels, pails, buckets and other tools. He brings a cooler and a beach chair, sunscreen and a few other odds and ends. But apart from that, he doesn't need much.

He loves a high tide to start, as it means less walking back and forth to his work site with heavy buckets of water. Low tide has its own rewards, but ease of building isn't among them. He generally stays four or five hours, and while he's there he's seldom alone.

"Everybody loves to stop and look."

What they don't know is that Huggins, who studied philosophy in college and runs an electrical equipment company for a living, is also one of southern New England's more accomplished amateur sand sculptors.

Though he used to draw a lot as a kid, he didn't get into sculpting until he was in his 30s. One day he, his wife and kids went to the beach and he was discouraged — "I had my surfboard, my boogie board and the water was flat. My wife was happy to sit and read. So what do I do? I dug a hole for the kids."

"I'm looking at this hole and I said, 'OK, I'll make a pyramid.' It didn't take long. Now I'm sitting back and I thought, 'What can I do to make it better?"

The next day, requisitioned kitchen utensils in hand, he modified the straight-sided pyramid into a more elaborate Aztec-style sculpture with terraces, stairs and right angles. He got his boys involved, and they were hooked.

Over the ensuing years, he dove in and learned more about high level sculpting, soaking up as much as he could about the finer points of the art. His skills progressed enough that he was able to work as a part time professional sculptor, joining Sandtasia, a professional outfit out of Tiverton, and building sometimes massive, elaborate pieces for weddings, parties and competitions.

His creations won him awards and appeared in the media as far away as Seattle, but in time the hobby grew into almost a job of its own and thus, lost some of its allure. The big moment came one day in Narragansett, after he'd just finished an enormous sculpture for a wedding. With the wedding party due to arrive any minute, he went to start his truck, parked right next to the piece, and got nothing.

"Luckily, a guy with a Hummer pulled us off the beach," he recalls. "But it was like, 'Man, I don't need this."

These days, Huggins sculpts on a much more modest level, stopping only when the piece is done or when he's too tired from the heavy work to continue. He has ideas in his head for 10 or 15 different pieces at any one time, and they can come from anywhere. Today's piece, the skull and books, was inspired by a Halloween decoration he spotted at Target.

"Maybe I'll add something spooky off to the side if it's still here tomorrow."