To this day, in the words of one historian, Evanton "remains today an attractive example of a well planned, regularly laid out estate village". The Reverend Thomas Munro expressed similar sentiments in the 1840s, when he wrote that "the village was built on a waste of land, and differs from all others in the country by its regular and neat appearance". The village suffered from the severe famine that plagued the Highlands in the 1840s. There was a riot in the village in 1846, because the authorities continued to export grain despite the failure of the previous year's potato crop; similar riots occurred in Rosemarkie, Balintraid and Avoch. In 1847, there was near starvation in the village, and the villagers managed to maintain themselves on turnips. However, the village population recovered; by the beginnings of the First World War, Evanton had taken much of its current physical shape, and at this point in time contained businesses as diverse as a tobacconist and a bicycle shop, both of which have subsequently disappeared.