oh well, at least you've highlighted the problem.. thanks anyway

i got this back from my server support about chkmod'ing to 770 in the web root.
"public_html folder should only be writeable by the owner, although group write permission will not harm it from the web users, you should still be careful."
I'll be doing that then, as having all my url's as site.com/pages/ just seems daft to me.