  We present the prototype telescope for the Next Generation Transit Survey,
which was built in the UK in 2008/09 and tested on La Palma in the Canary
Islands in 2010. The goals for the prototype system were severalfold: to
determine the level of systematic noise in an NGTS-like system; demonstrate
that we can perform photometry at the (sub) millimagnitude level on transit
timescales across a wide field; show that it is possible to detect transiting
super-Earth and Neptune-sized exoplanets and prove the technical feasibility of
the proposed planet survey. We tested the system for around 100 nights and met
each of the goals above. Several key areas for improvement were highlighted
during the prototyping phase. They have been subsequently addressed in the
final NGTS facility which was recently commissioned at ESO Cerro Paranal,
Chile.
