The worker is a ship’s carpenter with his plane (on ground) and a shaping adze over his shoulder. He is wearing corduroy trousers and a jacket and waistcoat –dungarees were a long way off for working men in 1870.
The yard is that at the Kelvin Dock on Maryhill Road, which was actually built as a repair facility for the canal in the 1790s, but later developed as a boat building yard owned by Swan & Co. in the 1850s, and lasting till the 1950s. The boatyard built mainly ironclad puffers, but the vessel shown is a wooden canal barge, with a swan motif. Swan was Maryhill’s first Provost in 1856, and initially lived in a mansion Collina, near the yard.
Notably, this panel features the name of Adam & Small’s company in the lower left.