Just 100 yards from the famous chapel of St. Peter on the Wall is a modest dark weatherboarded cottage – Linnett's Cottage. Its Grade II listing describes it as 'a rare survival of a marshman's cottage, possibly erected as accommodation for the seaman manning semaphore signal station during Napoleonic Wars.'

The signal station was built in 1798 at a cost of £165 19s 1d (a few pence shy of £166 for those unfamiliar with pred-Decimalisation coinage!). In fact the Historic England description does not do this justice, because a small crew under an officer would have manned the station, built to a standard design with two small rooms, an extra two lean-to rooms at the rear and a pantry/store at the front. A small range provided heating and cooking facilities for an officer and two midshipmen.

The officer had a small bed, the midshipmen hammocks. We know the name of one such officer – Lieutenant John Leckie. His name appears in requests for fresh drinking water, complaints about drunkenness in his men, and in a dispute over salvage of a smuggler's cargo.

That was the accommodation – what about the signalling? This was part of a sophisticated early-warning system to detect French invasion attempts, and would have been linked to similar stations at St Osyth and Tillingham. French invasion grew less and less likely with Britain's naval victories, but the system would have been just as valuable for relaying signals from ships at sea along the coast to other ships and naval headquarters.

An initial set-up of a mast with flags and balls was replaced with a semaphore system in 1812. Both could convey a surprising range of messages at high speed, the main limitation being variable visibility.

After the war, the building was handed back to the land's owners, and used as accommodation for agricultural workers. From 1871 we know that the Linnett family was living there. The most famous member of this family was Walter Linnett, a renowned wildfowler.

Walter Linnett was the last of the family to live at the cottage, dying in 1958 at the age of 81. He did a lot of his wildfowling with a punt gun, a formidable ten-foot weapon mounted on a punt and operated by the shooter lying prone in the punt and gently sculling towards the birds. Linnett was a prolific killer of wildfowl, but it should be remembered that for rural people of his day food and basic income was far more important than sport.

Wildfowling continues, even with punt guns, but is carefully regulated, and Linnett's famous cottage is used for birdwatchers peacefully observing the rich profusion of visiting birds.