- related to the term dean, this is used in place-names to describe a deep hollow between hills. It occurs throughout Scotland, for example in Easter Denhead in Perthshire, Dura Den in Fife and Hawthornden in Midlothian. Dens can also be wooded, and the following quotation from Sir Walter Scott's novel, Redgauntlet (1824), shows the survival of this meaning in literary usage:
At length, our course was crossed by a deep dell or dingle, such as they call in some parts of Scotland a den, and in others a cleuch, or narrow glen. It seemed... steep, precipitous, and full of trees.
The word was probably influenced by another meaning of den, an animal's lair, first recorded in Scots in Robert Henryson's fifteenth-century tale, The Preaching of the Swallow:
All wyld bestis... Drawis for dreid unto thair dennis deip.