Dern

Now with their backs to the den's mouth they sit, / Yet shoulder not all light from the dern pit.

Through dreary beds of tangled fern, / Through groves of nightshade dark and dern.

He at length escaped them by derning himself in a fox-earth.

But look how soon they heard of Holoferne / Their courage quail'd, and they began to derne.

1855, Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho!, Ch. XIV, How Salvation Yeo Slew the King of the Gubbings So I just put my eye between the wall and the dern of the gate, and I saw him come up to the back door […]